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of those enviable people who could sit talking for an afternoon at a table
outside one of the cafes in Rhombus, managed to read the piles of books most
people always had set aside but never seemed to get around to, had seen every
movie that was talked about, and yet all the things that he needed to do got
done.
He pulled a stool from under the bench by his desk, cleared away a box of data
disks balanced on some journals, and pushed it forward for her to sit down.
"You never told me you read minds. The timing's perfect. I'm wearing my brain
into a rut." He gestured at the screen and the rest of the mess around him,
then pushed back his own chair. "Did you ever try coffee? It's a Terran drink
made out of crushed dried beans. One of their addictions."
"Yes. They've started serving it at the Blue Planet. I heard somewhere it's
one of the things they're trying to grow back home."
"I've got some here. Want to try it?"
"Okay."
Iwon got up and moved to the bench, where a section of the shelf above was
reserved for jars and mugs. "Sweet?"
"You know I am."
"When have you known me argue? What about your coffee?"
"Please."
"I think they put cream or something in it, didn't they? I've only got this
powdered stuff you mix for dessert sauce."
"That's fine. It's okay black too."
"Really?" Iwon contemplated the mug he had been about to fill. "Maybe I'll
give it a try."
Lorili took a look around. "You look busy enough," she remarked.
"Oh, just staying out of Nostreny's way, really. He's running around in a
panic over something." Garki
Nostreny was the section chief. "So, anyway . . . what have you got?"
Lorili set down a sheaf of printouts that she had brought. "The results of
those bird DNA studies just came in. The parallels are striking. You can have
a look at them for yourself when you get a moment. It's just the kind of
pattern you'd expect from a common ancestry." She meant descent from common
ancestral genetic seed material in the way she had described to Kyal, that had
somehow found its way to both Earth and Venus.
Iwon was already shaking his head as he immersed a net bag of the crushed
beans into a flask to boil. But he didn't smile. Another thing Lorili liked
about him was that he wasn't condescending. It was nice to think she was being
taken seriously, even when their fundamental premises were at odds. "The time
scales just isn't there for anything like that to have happened on Venus," he
said. "And it's looking pretty certain now that it wasn't much better on Earth
either, whatever else the Terrans thought. Have you seen what's coming in from
the geologists? There are fossilized trees here, extending intact through
layers of coal and limestone that the Terrans dated as millions of years
apart." He turned briefly and tossed up his hands. "How could they be. The
trees didn't stand there for millions of years being slowly buried in
sediments. They were obviously buried rapidly. . . . And the boundaries
between the sediment layers are clean, with no signs of tracks, roots, worm
burrows, or any of the other biological activity you'd expect to find if the
surfaces had been exposed for any length of time."
Lorili had expected this much. They had been over it enough times. "But we
know that organisms can vary over time." She was simply staking out the
ground, not saying anything new.
"Nobody's disputing it," Iwon agreed. "There has to be some ability to adapt
over a range ofchanging conditions. But the same would have to be true
whatever its origin. And extrapolating non-controversial variations about a
theme to account for major differences between types is an act of faith, not
an inference from any evidence. Even the Terrans never stopped arguing over
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it. The universe doesn't possess enough probabilistic resources for the number
of trial combinations it would need."
Lorili held up her palms in a restraining gesture. "Okay, if it will save
time, I accept that the Terran idea of major change through selection of
random variations doesn't work. But here's another angle."
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